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$1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

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Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#141

Post by iandanforth »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #123

Personally this class of things really highlights an imbalance for me. Consider that Google runs its own own bus service for employees, and now is building housing for the same. Traditionally, successful businesses in a region paid taxes, and those taxes were used by the local governments to invest in infrastructure like public transport and urban development. So in this regard Google usurps the mandate of the commun…

FWIW I think it would be illegal if Google tried to make the housing exclusive to its employees in the same way that the buses are.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#142

Post by s3r3nity »

option wrote: post #99

I don’t understand why all the growth need to happen in this place and this place alone. Wouldn’t it be nice if “good” jobs overflow SV and appear in other places? (kind of happening to Austin, Boulder, NY, etc.) And people who already live in the area should absolutely have a right to direct it’s future.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted - it's the argument from NIMBY's that keeps getting pushed aside and needs to be properly addressed if this issue will ever get resolved.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: you don't have to live in California.

For $1B, you could probably build enough houses for every single Google employee in a place like Detroit, or most other states (Arizona? Nevada? Colorado? etc. etc.) and then have those employees live there on campus. In fact, with the savings on cost of living and the like, which would mean those workers don't need as high wages, you could probably do the math that this would _save_ you money in the long run.

(...then again someone probably _did_ do the math and determined that the investment in these 20k homes, with current market rates increasing at a crazy pace, would probably be a higher return, but I digress.)

People can complain about NIMBY's / supply side all they want, but the fact that the demand side (the labor market) refuses to correct itself more strongly (there is _some_ growth in places like Austin, Boulder, Chicago, Boston, etc., but not enough) is bonkers to me. And if I owned a home in the Valley, my incentive would be to never change that market dynamic.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#143

Post by ch4s3 »

ProAm wrote: post #104

> The only solution is changing the zoning laws Or these companies can move. If you take successful STEM related businesses and move them to better area's the talent will follow. There is more than 1 answer to this problem, most people just want to change laws because its easier for them.

Move them where? Is there some mystical place somewhere in the US that has laws amenable to running a tech business, decent weather, good universities, infrastructure (roads, fiber, transit, etc.), and is agreeable to at least another company so you can get some agglomeration effects? And then how do you convince tens of thousands of employees to move? How do you no just end up with the same problems, or crazy sprawl like Houston which has its own problems?

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#144

Post by Fins »

majormajor wrote: post #63
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That studio in San Francisco or Seattle comes with the opportunity of a high paying job at a tech company. ...and your high paying job mostly pays your landlord. If the same company offered the same job to remote employees for comparable pay, it'd remove the financial incentive to move to these cities. This would have a lot of immediate obvious benefits.

> ...and your high paying job mostly pays your landlord. Unfortunately I haven't seen many roles in, say, Dallas or Atlanta where the pay is only 20-25K or so less than my current, total-comp wise. It'd be a bigger drop, usually. The rent gap is steep, but the comp gap can be larger.

Shouldn't you also count the absence of the state income tax (at least for Dallas) and lower prices for pretty much everything else?

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#145

Post by rhinoceraptor »

PaulHoule wrote: post #128
djakjxnanjak wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way, no how is Google or any other decent employer going to uproot all their knowledge workers and make them unproductive for the foreseeable future by forcing them to move to another region. The diaspora from the Bay Area will keep happening the way it has been: at the economic margins. Over time, people outside of tech who aren’t subsidized by prop 13 or rent control will get priced out. There will be a perpetua…

It's an interesting question. How much less productive would these workers be if they were moved to Salt Lake City or Henderson, NV or Syracuse, NY? If you lost 20% of the productivity but could pay 30% less that would be OK, wouldn't it?

In the long run they'd be as productive (or more, since the commute would likely be better). The problem is it would take months or years to move, and a lot of people don't want to or can't move, so they'd quit and find a new job almost instantly.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#146

Post by TulliusCicero »

PaulHoule wrote: post #128
djakjxnanjak wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No way, no how is Google or any other decent employer going to uproot all their knowledge workers and make them unproductive for the foreseeable future by forcing them to move to another region. The diaspora from the Bay Area will keep happening the way it has been: at the economic margins. Over time, people outside of tech who aren’t subsidized by prop 13 or rent control will get priced out. There will be a perpetua…

It's an interesting question. How much less productive would these workers be if they were moved to Salt Lake City or Henderson, NV or Syracuse, NY? If you lost 20% of the productivity but could pay 30% less that would be OK, wouldn't it?

It's moot because they'd lose so many employees immediately that it'd be economic suicide. Google can't instantly conjure 5,000 more high quality engineers out of nowhere in SLC.

The most you'll see is something like what Amazon (sort of) tried with creating a "second HQ".

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#147

Post by filoleg »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #16
davidw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked remote, and it's ok, but it's not the same thing as being in the office. It's not the same thing as having a bunch of local companies to choose from. Or from the company's point of view, it's nice to have a lot of local workers. And then there's stuff like high quality universities, and of course venture capital.

> It's not the same thing as having a bunch of local companies to choose from. What is the intrinsic advantage to having "local companies" to choose from in a world where every company you'd want to work for also offered remote positions? > Or from the company's point of view, it's nice to have a lot of local workers. Same question for that perspective, except I do have a few ideas of a cynical answer to that questio…

>What is the intrinsic advantage to having "local companies" to choose from in a world where every company you'd want to work for also offered remote positions?

The advantage is that on the path in-between now and the perfect future where all companies are remote-first( that we are not sure will ever happen), you will not be at a significant disadvantage when it comes to job prospects. I don't think that many people would be willing to heavily limit their job prospects (not even taking into account all the other advantages that come with living in a densely populated coastal city) while waiting for that "bright all-remote future" that may never come.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#148

Post by s3r3nity »

djakjxnanjak wrote: post #121
ProAm wrote: post #104

> The only solution is changing the zoning laws Or these companies can move. If you take successful STEM related businesses and move them to better area's the talent will follow. There is more than 1 answer to this problem, most people just want to change laws because its easier for them.

No way, no how is Google or any other decent employer going to uproot all their knowledge workers and make them unproductive for the foreseeable future by forcing them to move to another region. The diaspora from the Bay Area will keep happening the way it has been: at the economic margins. Over time, people outside of tech who aren’t subsidized by prop 13 or rent control will get priced out. There will be a perpetua…

I want to agree that the labor market will correct at some point, but to your point, it's only at the margins for now, and is way too slow to adjust.

There are too many people who feel like they _have_ to live there (or NYC / insert overly populated city here) to have a career, that any sort of correction will take decades.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#149

Post by malnourish »

caymanjim wrote: post #75

It's great that Google wants to increase housing, but is this really going to work? The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not a money problem. If it were possible to build 20,000 houses in the next 20 years, it would absolutely happen without Google's help. The problem with housing there has one simple cause: NIMBYism. SF doesn't want to allow taller buildings and denser housing complexes. It's vastly worse in the…

Honest question - how much (if any) of those laws were made with respect to earthquakes? Perhaps they are from a time when resistant high rises weren't tenable.

Re: $1B for 20,000 Bay Area homes

#150

Post by davidw »

CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #124
davidw wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only we had the knowledge to plan cities so that it's possible to live near where you work. Perhaps it sounds crazy, but we could even stack dwelling units on top of one another.

Witchcraft! Seriously though: It'd be great if apartments were better sound-proofed. My only gripe with apartment living was inadequate privacy and being woken up at 3 AM by a lead-footed upstairs resident.

In places like Europe where more people live in them, they tend to do a bit better job of privacy, because they're not just 'cheap housing for people without the means to live in a "real" house'.
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